What is a game marketplace

In this article I will use “game marketplaces” to refer to platforms like Steam, the Epic Games Store, Roblox, GoG, and the like: sites where you can find different games to play (paid or not), who offer hosting (you access your games through them), and have some amount discoverability for the games on their stores. Outside of this definition are sites like Humble Bundle or other key [re]sellers which usually just redirect the user to one of the main platforms to claim their games.

There’s an odd one out on that list: Roblox. Some might not consider it a “traditional” marketplace, in a sense, because Roblox only offers games that can be played on Roblox, as opposed to the others which offer separate downloads for each game. I don’t think it disqualifies it for our purposes.

Anyways what I want you to know is that we’re talking about places where you can find games so you can buy them and play them.

Also, I’m gonna be using “buying” as a general stand in for “acquiring, downloading, purchasing, or otherwise finding the means to play a game”; but most games on Roblox are free and there are hundreds of free, quality games on other platforms as well.

Adequacy?

Adequacy is the ability of a certain demand to be met in the market. In the case of games we could say that the demand is “fun”. In exchange of enough money for the developer to make a living and hopefully a bit more.

Fun, for players, means a lot of different things. They may want to compete, or explore, or enjoy a story, or solve puzzles, etc. Players also care about a lot of other factors, like music, graphics, and so on. We’ll just group the general value gotten from a game under fun.

No player —barring eccentric rich people— is going to personally pay for the development of a game that nails all of their likes, so they are content with paying a lot less and getting a game that appeals to a wider audience but still overlaps with their likes; they each contribute a bit of money towards paying the full price of development.

Niche games, understandably, get a smaller audience, but that audience is willing to pay a bit more than otherwise; because their wants are more closely satisfied. We would say then that the market has been adequate at providing their fun for the price.

I posit that, for certain types of games, Roblox is much more adequate than its competitors at meeting the players’ wants for fun.

How it plays out on different stores

To succeed as a game developer in traditional platforms like Steam or Epic Games, you need to either have a big marketing budget, to become a marketer yourself —through social media like YouTube, in many cases indie developers have found an audience by posting devlogs—, or to get lucky enough that someone with a large enough preexisting audience finds your game and brings it to attention.

For this reason, traditional storefronts are generally inadequate at getting the player the most fun for their buck. The price of development has gone up, due to having to spend resources on marketing or altering the game itself to be “more marketable“ when they could’ve been spent on fun.

This is because one of the biggest issues when trying to find a game to play is, well, finding it. In 2025, more than 50 games were released on Steam each day (source). Are you gonna sift through all of them and try to find one you might like? Gotta spend on some marketing, let people know about it, lest you risk your game go unnoticed and forgotten.

This is where one of the most polarizing inventions of the 21st century comes in: the recommendation algorithm^[1]. When you visit the Steam homepage you mostly get recommended games that are already popular —safe bets— but throughout the years they’ve been experimenting with other ways of recommending games and one that has stuck is the Discovery Queue; personalized recommendations based on other games you play; though I do feel that it still doesn’t recommend “hidden gems”, I’ve mostly already heard of most games that pop up in my queue. Other than Steam, their competitors are mostly busy shooting themselves in the foot by not implementing something similar.

Some years ago Roblox switched from showing you the “charting” games by default to showing you games that are specifically recommended to you based on [certain markers of] what you like. With this system you really get recommended stuff on all levels of popularity, I’ve personally gotten recommendations ranging from the most popular game ever to games that have just ten players online.

What Roblox is doing well

Thanks to the way the Roblox algorithm works, the starting push a developer needs to get their game noticed is way smaller: Your marketing budget needs not exceed 100$ to get enough players to get “on the algorithm” and if you can get some friends playing it can get noticed and picked up for free.

In this sense, Roblox has an upper hand over other marketplaces: studios don’t have to spend a ton of their budget on marketing (half of a AAA game’s budget can go to marketing (source)).

I suspect that part of why Roblox’s algorithm is seemingly so accurate is because of the sheer amount of data they can get with regards to what games you enjoy. Games on Roblox require no download and are mostly all free. This means that the cost of you trying out a game is very very little. If you don’t like it just leave (the algorithm will remember that).

Why does Steam recommend mostly already popular games? Because people are more likely to buy popular games. Once you have to decide to make a purchase, there’s a lot more friction to trying out new stuff, and so, Steam has less data points to point at what makes an enjoyable game for you other than being popular. (Yes, one could buy it and return it, but are you going through the trouble? I’m definitely not, I’d rather wait for a sale or just go play Roblox).

In a situation where I see a game that looks like maybe I’ll enjoy but with enough markers of maybe not, if it’s on Roblox I’ll try it, could be great (this is what happens often enough); if it’s on Steam I’m not taking the gamble.

This flexibility can be seen in other aspects of games’ development: graphics and polish. Roblox is usually associated with a more simplistic art style (even though people make marvels), but its prevalence is just an indication of players’ choices (would you rather play a fun simple game or a pretty but boring game). This has been proven time and time again, with simplistic indie games rocking the traditional video game market because the game is good and fun. Ah, but what indicates enough polish that you’re willing to spend money on it? An ugly(-er) game has more chances of not being good, so spend resources in art instead of fun to signal that your game could be fun.^[2] Inadequacy is sometimes paradoxical isn’t it?

Without knowing how the algorithm actually works, we can assume that each game gets a “recommendability score” based on certain metrics and then based on metadata gleaned from the thousands of other experiences on the platform it sees what types of games you like to play and recommends you similar ones that have a high enough score.

Based on what Roblox exposes to developers and anecdotal data, the main metrics are:

• Play time: How long players spend playing the game. Games on Roblox have a really low barrier to entry (no downloads, almost always no up-front cost), so games that manage to engage players early and keep them engaged are really valued.
• Retention: The rates at which players come back to play, usually measured in 1-day and 7-day rates. This ties into the previous point, better games keep you coming back.
• Conversion rate: The percentage of players that decide to spend money on your game. This is pretty straightforward, if a game is free and engaging enough that players decide to spend money on it, it’s a pretty good indicator that the game is “good”. This metric also has the added benefit that players spending money in your experience directly translates in money having been made by Roblox as well.
• Average revenue per [paying] user: “Paying” is in brackets because you can get access to both revenue per daily user or per paying user; both metrics indicate the same and if you have the conversion rate it’s pretty easy to transform one into the other. This is just another indicator of how much players are willing to spend in your game, more = better (in some cases).
• Play-through rate: This is where marketing makes an appearance again. This metric measures the percentage of players that see your game being recommended to them and decide to play it, be it because of your title, your thumbnail, or cultural pervasiveness. Not that you need to spend a ton on thumbnails anyways, anecdotally (from third parties and personally), a lot of the times a screenshot of the game will be the thumbnail that works best.

When this set of stats is “good enough” for a given game, Roblox determines that it’s fun, and if recommended to you, you will probably like it and help increase those stats.

Where Roblox is limited

The algorithm, fallible as all recommendation systems are, has to guide itself on certain metrics to recommend games to others and see what you could be interested in.

Of course there’s no way to measure fun, and really, it’s not what Roblox is setting out to do; it just happens that these metrics line up well enough for certain genres that people feel satisfied with the market and keep coming back. They exclude a lot of types of games that you could enjoy though:

• Single player games: Roblox has always been marketed as a social game/platform, where you can make friends and play with them. It is known that you inviting your friends to a game or playing with them, helps boost it in the algorithm. Because, again, this signals that it’s fun. It’s not up to debate whether single player games can be fun, of course they can be, but the roblox market values social games more. (I have gotten single player, story driven games recommended to me on Roblox, but very few of them)
• Completely free games: If you’re allergic to micro transactions and don’t include any in your game, expect to take a hit. Spending money is a very big indicator that you are enjoying something, even more when you are already getting it for free.
• Non-replayable games: Story games, puzzle games, and the like need to be replayable to sustain a player base, by either adding more stuff constantly or having some way to try again and still be engaging.
• Short games: A short game, like 2048 or the ones that are played idly on a phone while waiting for the bus, takes a big hit on play time. Aren’t you engaged? Why are you leaving after two minutes then?

There are examples of all of these types of games that have become popular and were financially viable in Roblox; what I’m getting at is that they really have to stand out, more than their competitors, because they’re forgoing some of the recommendability markers. In this way, we could say that the Roblox market is inadequate at providing these specific types of games to players.

Which market is adequate at providing the ultimate super fun but marker-less game? I don’t know, because I can’t think of one that’s incentivized to do so.

Other things it’s got going for it

It’s hard to separate Roblox the platform from Roblox the engine and Roblox the game marketplace so I might as well go into some of the things that make Roblox a possibly desirable environment to develop games other than its recommendation algorithms:

Roblox is also its own engine used to create and play games on the platform. This engine is very easy to use and comes prepackaged with a ton of features that make development accessible to people of all ages. They also provide hosting, networking, and payment processing (and more), which reduce the operational workload of developers, freeing up resources for, you guessed it, making games more fun.

You might also have wondered how developers make money if their games are free. The straightforward answer is micro transactions (MTX), small purchases that give players some sort of reward for buying it in-game. But Roblox also partakes in revenue sharing, similar to platforms like YouTube, or Tiktok. The company makes money thanks to the stuff users upload and other users (or advertisers in the case of social media companies) pay for, so they give back some of the revenue they capture to the users who enable the system. This means that developers don’t have to implement MTX in their games to make money, just creating an engaging experience played is rewarded in its own right, as it benefits the market at wide even if not directly driving revenue.

Roblox is also multi platform: available on PC, consoles and mobile. This greatly increases the market surface a game can cater to, and as such, lower the individual price for each player by dividing the cost of development among more people.

In my opinion, the Roblox game marketplace is much more adequate than its competitors at providing certain kinds of games; mainly due to less resource dilution required by its developers to get people to play the games they make.

I'd appreciate feedback both on the topic at hand and on my writing, always looking to improve. Thanks for reading!

No AI has been used for writing this post. I advocate for disclaiming AI use, but since that is hard to get people to do, this is the next best thing.

1. ^{^}

   There’s a possible argument to be had about handing our agency to impersonal algorithms that decide what we should see and play; I’ll brush on some of this later on this post but the broader philosophical intricacies will be left for another day. Broad strokes are that as with most things, moderation is key; We do need some sort of tool to sift through all of the possibilities that we are afforded every day, but we can’t let it dictate everything.

2. ^{^}

   art, as in graphical art, has its place in video games of course, as it does in any other Artistic medium, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. I’m referring to art used for the sake of signaling “quality”.